03 July 2026
Venezuela After the Earthquakes
On June 24, 2026, two earthquakes struck Venezuela with magnitudes of 7.2 and 7.5. As of 2 July, the official death toll has climbed past 2,295, and more than 38,600 people remain unaccounted for. Having lived through the disaster in Caracas and seeing people desperately crying for help, only reinforces our own empirical understanding of a state in decline. Democracy depends on social trust and a functioning state with administrative capacities. Within hours, what the earthquakes revealed was the extent to which those foundations have eroded in Venezuela. Continue reading >>
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13 June 2016
The European Union and the Erosion of State Capacity
The broad assumption in Europe is that member states of the European Union inherently have the capacity to implement EU legislation. This proceeds from the general understanding of Weber’s definition of the modern state as having a monopoly of legal violence within its territory. To this can be added the capacity of the state to “read” the population, to know through censuses, registers data bases who the inhabitants of the state are and, for that matter, where they are; the ability to impose taxes; and the capacity to sustain the uniform distribution of authority. Continue reading >>
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